Wednesday, February 11, 2009

TOra QuickStart - Connecting TOra to an Oracle Server

This is a TOra and Windows XP quickstart guide. This guide should work with other versions of Windows, and should be very similar for Linux clients. Pay close attention to the oracle client version. If unsure, visit the TOra sourceforge page and ask.

Steps:

Download Oracle Client Version 10.2.0.4 "Instant Client Package - Basic: All files required to run OCI, OCCI, and JDBC-OCI applications". (Note: Lite version may work too)

Note: (Imonoid) TORA won't work if you try to use the BaciLite InstantClient when connecting to a non-english Oracle database.

Extract (copy or drag) the DLL files from "instantclient-basic-win32-10.2.0.4.zip" to "C:\Program Files\TOra\"

Next, launch the TOra icon on your desktop. There will be two icons. Click the one that just says "TOra". (If TOra isn't installed already, download and install it from here: http://tora.sourceforge.net)

Now set up your client as follows:

Connection Provider: Oracle (Instant Client)Username: usernamePassword: ******Host: 10.1.1.1 (The ip or hostname of the server)Schema: (leave blank for now)Port: (leave at 1521)Database: (get this from the SID = XXX value in your ORACLE_HOME's TNSNAMES.ORA file. You may also find it in "c:\orant\NET80\ADMIN\TNSNAMES.ORA") If this file doesn't exist, you can probably guess this value pretty easily.

Good luck!

Took me a while to get this working. Hopefully this saves some work for others out there. Thanks to TOra for an excellent client.

5 comments:

Thanks very much for this. I have installed TORA on my PC too and was kinda curious why It was not working. I'm quite glad to have read this HOW-TO of yours because I was not aware of how important the InstantClient client was in making TORA work properly. Thanks again!

BTW, TORA won't work if you try to use the BaciLite InstantClient when connecting to a non-english Oracle database.

Had the 11.2 instClient, reverted to 10.2 (some other post mentioned that TORA binary was built against the 10.2 libraries), but forgot the oci.dll local to TORA was going to be picked up before the dll in the instClient install directory. The copy of client dll's into TORA dir was the ticket.